Seagate Blackarmor NAS 440 recovery

After about twenty years, I felt ZAR can no longer be updated to match the modern requirements, and I decided to retire it.

ZAR is replaced by Klennet Recovery, my new general-purpose DIY data recovery software.

If you are looking specifically for recovery of image files (like JPEG, CR2, and NEF), take a look at Klennet Carver, a separate video and photo recovery software.

I have a Blackarmor NAS 440 with 4 - 1TB drives setup with RAID 5. 1 drive failed completely and there are some bad sectors on another drive. Ran a few other programs that weren't even able to get any data (runtime, reclaime) used the following instructions with the latest ZAR after running reclaime and was able get about 60% of my data.

Generated by ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery build 1073, www.FreeRaidRecovery.com
These instructions are provided for Zero Assumption Recovery starting with version 9 build 38
1. Launch Zero Assumption Recovery
2. Click "Data Recovery for Windows and Linux. This is OK because we've already done the RAID reconstruction.

3. Right click anywhere in the disk list, select "Define RAID manually".

4. From the "Available drives" list, select "Disk 3 - ST31000528AS", then click "Add".
5. From the "Available drives" list, select "Disk 4 - ST31000528AS", then click "Add".
6. From the "Available drives" list, select "Disk 1 - ST31000528AS", then click "Add".
7. Next to the "Array members" table, click "Add parity".
8. From the "Array members" table, select the last entry (ID 0500). Click "Move up" 2 times. Verify that the parity drive (ID 0500) is at the row 2 (the top row is number 1).
9. On the right side under "Array configuration", set "RAID type" to "RAID5 (MS/LDM)".
10. Below that, set "Stripe size" to "128 sectors".
11. Below that, set "Parity start/rotation" to 3/3.
12. In the "Array members" table, enter "96,1953525168" as "Start, Size" in all rows.

13. Set "Parity delay, stripes" to 1.
14. Set "Stripes in first delayed block" to 1.

15. Click "OK". The warning message may appear stating that "Starting sectors and sizes are incorrect". Click "OK" to dismiss the message box, then click "OK" on the manual RAID setup form again to close the form. This is the expected behavior.
16. In the device list, "Virtual RAID #0" is the newly created RAID. Double click it to start recovery.
Generated by ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery build 1073, www.FreeRaidRecovery.com


It ended up crashing towards the end, the thread error I have read about on the forum.

Decided to run the analysis again just using the instructions from the ZAR website, it's just really slow. Two days and I'm only at 40% for the raid analysis. I have all drives hooked up to a 4 core win 7 x64 machine w/ 8Gb of memory. Read cache is expanded to 512mb, write cache is set to 107mb.

Can I do anything to improve the speed?

You need to image the drive(s) with bad sectors first. "Thread errors" I've seen are mostly associated with running out of memory while trying to handle too many bad sectors simultaneously.

I'm trying to do a pretty heavy file recovery from 4x1TB hard drives that were in a Seagate Black Armor NAS, the NAS started acting really funny the other day and after receiving 2 replacement units and having the exact same problem, I concluded the problem was with the drives.

The problem is, I have to backup the data on the drives and I have no idea how to access them. When I hook them up to my computer, it doesn't identify them as a RAID and I can't see any partitions.

So I'm trying to use ZAR to recover the data, but I'm not really sure what kind of SCAN I need to run or how I do it. I try to run one kind of scan, started 2 days ago and it was running for about 35 hours, seemed like it was going pretty well but then at the end it crashed the program with the error.
This is very exhausting, every attempt I make at recovery takes DAYS and I'm not even sure I'm doing this right.

Firstly, when recovering data it is recommended connect the drives directly to a PC running the recovery (via SATA) rather than using some sort of USB boxes which are known to reduce speed, compared to direct SATA connection.

Also, it is advisable to check S.M.A.R.T status of the disks coming from the NAS in question before recovering data and create disk image files at the slightest sing of faulty disk(s), for example bad sectors or even reallocated sectors are revealed.

RAID recovery, that is recovery of RAID configuration parameters like block size, start offset and disk order, usually takes a lot of time. NASes, and Seagate BlackArmor including, typically use the Linux md-raid driver to manage RAID meaning that in most cases you should try to "read" md-raid metadata first to obtain NAS configuration, as described in our NAS recovery tutorial. Only if it fails, try a full-scale RAID recovery.